Day 10 of my 3,000km bus journey up the east coast of Australia, and I’m dropped off on the side of the road in central Queensland at 1:10am, about 30km from my destination.
It is cold. It is desolate. We are in what appears to be a bay where truckers sleep in their cabs. It’s disorienting but I calm myself with thoughts of pizza.
My friend Brendan has opened a pizza restaurant in the town of Agnes Water (population 2,210) which seemed a good enough reason to visit – even at this inhospitable hour.
Agnes Water is off the main highway between Bundaberg and Gladstone. It’s lovely. Within a day I was on realestate.com, plotting a new life here. There’s a stunning and sheltered main beach, then a road up to a headland where you can fish, stand-up paddleboard, swim, watch the sunset over the water, have some oysters and a crisp glass of wine.
And the pizza is excellent.
But reality intrudes. I have a bus to catch. And Brendan reminds me that I am still only halfway to Cairns. On the night of my scheduled departure at 12:30am, I get a midnight text from the bus company. The bus is delayed 1.5 to 2.5 hours. That’s kind of a wide range to be standing outside on the side of the road in the middle of night. We give it a miss and my wish to be stuck in Agnes Water is granted – at least for another 24 hours. But another day here puts pressure on the rest of the trip – leaving me only three days to cover the 1,288.5km to Cairns.
**
The following night the bus travels to Airlie Beach, where I get off at around 9am, then head to my accommodation where I sleep for most of the day. From the balcony I see the Whitsundays and it looks like paradise.
The next morning I get back on the bus again. This is an eight-hour stint from Airlie Beach to Mission Beach.
The breeze is strong outside and the palm trees bend. The landscape is not lush and tropical as I imagined it to be, but scrubby and dry, the vegetation harsh and low to the ground.
In the bus the chemical smell of someone’s V Energy drink is all-pervasive.
We pass salt pans, telegraph poles and mudflats filled with pale pink water that are oddly beautiful but also eerie. Is the colour natural or is it pollution? Raptors circle overhead.
We keep driving; palm trees, service station stops, small towns with tin and wood houses, chain-link fences, closed shops with “for lease” signs and grand old pubs all rendered gorgeous in the dappled winter sun.
Late afternoon, and in Tully they are burning sugar cane in a paddock. I see it as a blur through the bus window, over my shoulder, as we pull out of town. The sight is strangely exciting, evoking a borrowed nostalgia for an Australia that I thought no longer existed – the Australia of Ray Lawler’s play Summer of the Seventeeth Doll; that 1985 GANGgajang song about lightning crackling over canefields; the Go-Betweens’ Cattle and Cane; the Jimmy Barnes film clip Working Class Man – with a canefield fire raging behind him.
It’s a romantic image, I suppose. In a landscape that rolled past me for weeks, intimidating in its size, sometimes bland to the point of hypnosis – the canefields burning is a picture of Australia I can seize and remember.
**
In the final push north, I began to dread the journey itself, not because it was long and boring, and sometimes happened through the night which prevented me from a decent sleep, but because of the loop of thoughts I had while on the bus.
The thoughts – sometimes 10 hours at a stretch – were: what’s the point?, you just go on a journey, it’s hard and sometimes it’s beautiful, then you get to where you need to be, then turn around and go back. It seemed meaningless. Under fluorescent lights of service stations, as the white lines turned to one in a blur, in the cold air outside and the warm stale air inside the bus, on the long, long, empty highway – I wondered …isn’t that what LIFE IS?? Like going to Cairns on the bus? In my brain, deprived of company and the internet (my battery was low – on 1%!!, I did not bring a charger), the whole trip became a metaphor for existence. When the trip went badly, it seemed as if my existence was cursed. When it went well, my life was blessed.
By the time I got on the bus for the last leg of 2.5 hours to Cairns I felt very depression-adjacent.
I kept asking myself “What for?” What was I doing this trip for? Why was I travelling 3,000km up to the top of Australia by bus, getting there, then going to the airport and flying back?
If there had been a reason, I had forgotten it.
But the impulse had probably started in lockdown – a longing to meet this country again, see it unfurl all the border declarations, permits, state being pitted against state, the whole miserable smallness of the last two years.
It was the yearning, I suppose, to be free. To connect with the country and hopefully connect with others.
I did connect with people. The friends I saw on the way, and the new people I met. I met surfers in Suffolk Park that wanted to talk about Marcus Aurelius, a tourist operator in 1770 who introduced dog stand paddle-boarding to Australia, an electrician who implored me to go to Yeppoon and rent a boat, a taxi driver in Airlie Beach who fondly recalled the days of jobkeeper, and a masseur in Cairns who told me about north Queensland feet.
As he stretched out my back he told me about people who worked on farms without shoes, people who worked on boats without shoes, people who worked in kitchens without shoes.
The bloke who worked in a kitchen without shoes had grown “skin shoes” on the soles of his feet so tough that he felt nothing when he walked on rocks. That is until the masseur noticed unusual swelling and heat in the man’s feet and ankles, and a trip to hospital revealed he had glass embedded deep within the skin. His feet were so tough he didn’t even realise he had glass in his foot.
By day 15 I was ready to go home. My trip was done. It was fitting then that my flight back to Sydney was cancelled on the way to the airport.
This country – once it’s under your skin, it does not let you go easily.
Brigid Delaney is a Guardian Australia columnist
